Part 2 (1/2)

One such immigrant was James Rouse who had lived and worked on the street since at least 1840. Rouse possessed a talent for his trade combined with shrewd business sense. By 1861, he had accrued sufficient savings to relocate to more s.p.a.cious premises in Lamb Street and described himself in the census of that year as a 'master boot maker'. Two of his sons are listed as apprentices. The profit made from the business in the following decade allowed him to retire in the 1870s and live a comfortable life in the middle-cla.s.s suburb of Bromley.

In 1851, there were 50 people living in Dorset Street who had been born in Ireland. Some like James Rouse and his family had lived in London for some time while others almost certainly arrived on the street as a direct result of the famine in their homeland. At number 16, William Keefe and his family shared their home with four women who had almost certainly escaped deprivation in Ireland and were attempting to make new lives for themselves in the British mainland. Three of the women, Margaret Casey, 35, Margaret Lynch, 20, and Mary Ann Doughan, 35, hailed from Cork while their room-mate, Catherine Allen, 27, hailed from Galway. None of the women were married and so it was entirely up to them to ensure the rent was paid on time. The two Margarets and Catherine worked as seed potters (probably for one of the merchants in Spitalfields Market). This type of work was both home-based and seasonal. One can imagine the mess as flowerpots were filled with soil ready for seeds to be planted in the spring and the growing anxiety felt by the women as summer approached and work became increasingly scarce.

Irish refugees with families in tow found emigration to London particularly challenging, both emotionally and financially. Back in Ireland, even the largest cities such as Dublin were nowhere near as noisy, dirty and frenetic as mid-19th century London. In order to lessen the inevitable homesickness and to keep a rein on rental expenditure, many set up home with members of their extended kin. The Keating family arrived in Dorset Street in the late 1840s. Like so many other Irish immigrants to the East End the head of the family, John Keating, was a boot maker who brought not only his young wife and child with him but also his mother-in-law, brother-in-law, niece and an apprentice. Although the family comprised six adults and a seven-year-old, they all lived in one room at number 25 Dorset Street while John attempted to make a go of his business.

The arrival of famine refugees on the streets of Spitalfields was not well received by the locals, including other Irishmen. The migrants soon gained a reputation for attempting to fit far too many members of their family into one room in order to save money (see the Keatings above). The resulting noise and constant comings and goings irritated their neighbours who did not understand that the extreme overcrowding was due to poverty rather than choice. In 1853, John Garwood unkindly noted 'in the days of Queen Elizabeth, it was customary to divide the Irish in to three cla.s.ses: the Irish, the wild Irish and the extreme wild Irish... The same divisions may be made in the days of Queen Victoria... And the cla.s.s of Irish with which we are most familiar in the courts and alleys of London, are by no means the most favourable specimens of the nation.'

Many Londoners resented the fact that the majority of refugees used their city as a stepping-stone to their goal of reaching America. This even caused divisions between the immigrants and their own countrymen. Garwood explained, 'of the Irish immigrants who remain in London, few have any such intention at first. But they gradually become accustomed to the place and its habits, and at length settle down in it. Their descendants are called ”Irish c.o.c.kneys,” and the new-comers are called ”Grecians.' By these names they are generally distinguished among themselves. And the two divisions of this cla.s.s are most distinct. The animosity which subsists between them is very bitter, far beyond that which often unhappily exists between the Irish and the English. The c.o.c.kneys regard the Grecians as coming to take the bread out of their own mouths, and consider their extensive immigration as tending to lower their own wages. Having also succeeded in raising themselves, at least some steps, from that abject poverty and nakedness which distinguished them on their first arrival, they now look on the Grecians as bringing a discredit on their country by their appearance and necessities. There are constant quarrels between the two, and they are so estranged that they will not live even in the same parts of the town, after the first flow of generous hospitality has pa.s.sed over.'

To the immense relief of all concerned, the 1850 Irish potato crop finally survived. However, it did not yield as much as it had done before the outbreak of the fungal virus and many communities continued to exist in great hards.h.i.+p. By this time, over one million people had died as a result of the worst famine to occur in Europe in the 19th century. As the statistics on page 63 show, the amount of contributions towards pa.s.sages out of the country steadily increased into the 1850s and, although the worst of the famine was over, the Irish continued their exodus in the hope that a better life could be found elsewhere. Their migration was helped immeasurably by compet.i.tion between the steam-boat companies who slashed their prices in order to attract more custom. Pa.s.sage from Cork to London, which normally cost around 10 s.h.i.+llings, could be obtained for as little as one s.h.i.+lling. There were even reports of some companies bringing pa.s.sengers over to the British mainland for no charge whatsoever.

Chapter 10.

The McCarthy Family.

One Irish family that took advantage of the new, rock-bottom prices were destined to become Dorset Street's most influential residents. In 1848, Daniel McCarthy and his pregnant wife Margaret, boarded a s.h.i.+p sailing from Cork harbour and left their homeland behind them. After a brief stay in Dieppe (where it is likely Daniel sought work in the Docks), the McCarthys, who by now had a baby son named John, arrived in England.

Daniel had previously been used to agricultural work so the family initially made for Hertfords.h.i.+re, where it was hoped that permanent farm work could be secured. However, this was not to be and for the next five or so years, the family travelled across London and the home counties, picking up menial jobs wherever they could. However, like so many of their countrymen before them, they were eventually forced into the metropolis permanently, where work, however demeaning and badly paid, was in greater supply.

The McCarthys settled in Red Cross Court, in Southwark. This mean yard was a typical London address for impoverished Irishfolk fleeing the famine in their homeland. It had originally been the back yard of the Red Cross Inn a hostelry on Borough High Street. However, as the population of The Borough exploded in the early 19th century, the yard was built over. Two-storey cottages lined its perimeter and a row of dilapidated stables ran down the centre. By the 1860s, the occupants of Red Cross Court were far too poor to keep horses so the stables served as stockrooms for oranges that were bought at Borough Market and sold cheaply on the streets by the Court's inhabitants.

By the time Daniel and Margaret McCarthy arrived in Red Cross Court, their family had increased significantly. Joining John were four brothers: Denis, Jeremiah, Timothy and Daniel. In 1865, a daughter named Annie was born. During the following years, Red Cross Court became something of a Mecca for members of the McCarthy clan. By 1881, there were McCarthys living at numbers 1, 4, 9, 10 and 12 plus two more McCarthy families living at number 2 and 24 May Pole Alley, which was situated next door. By this time Daniel and Margaret had moved across the river to Whitechapel where they lived out the rest of their lives in quiet obscurity. However, their eldest son John harboured grand ideas about his future and set about laying plans to escape the grinding poverty of London's slums plans that were to be more successful than probably even he would have imagined.

Like the Borough across the river, Spitalfields and roads such as Dorset Street in particular became an attractive destination for impoverished Irish immigrants because it offered insalubrious but cheap accommodation and was close to the potential workplaces of the City, the Docks and, of course, the market. Many of the working-cla.s.s Irish immigrants found work as costermongers, buying fruit and vegetables from the market and taking them round the streets on a barrow to sell to the residents. During his investigation into how London's poor lived and worked, Henry Mayhew studied the Irish costermongers in depth. At the time, it was officially estimated that there were 10,000 Irish street-sellers in London. However, Mayhew reckoned the figure to be higher. He noted, 'of this large body, three-fourths sell only fruit, and more specifically nuts and oranges; indeed the orange season is called the ”Irishman's Harvest.” The others deal in fish, fruit and vegetables... some of the most wretched of the street Irish deal in such trifles as Lucifer-matches, water-cresses, etc.'

In addition to street-selling, many Irish immigrants who had previously been employed on farms took to labouring in the building trade. Some took casual labouring work at the docks, while others took on the back-breaking work of excavating and wood chopping. When work was thin on the ground (as it often was), both men and women would take to the streets and beg.

This hand-to-mouth existence meant that accommodation was hard to find. Families barely had enough money to feed themselves, let alone enough to find rent money for a reasonably furnished room. Consequently the common lodging houses that lined Dorset Street (and many other streets in Spitalfields), experienced an unprecedented boom. However, their burgeoning business was soon to come under the scrutiny of social reformers, journalists and ultimately, the Government.

Chapter 11.

The Common Lodging House Act.

By the beginning of the 1850s, the already pitiful plight of the poor in Spitalfields had been exacerbated to an almost unbearable degree by the arrival of the Irish immigrants. The area was now among the poorest in the whole of London and was beginning to attract the attention of the press. In 1849, the journalist Henry Mayhew visited Spitalfields in search of acute poverty for an article he was writing for the Morning Chronicle newspaper. He was particularly touched by the plight of the old silk weavers, who he found living 'in a state of gloomy dest.i.tution, sitting in their wretched rooms dreaming of the neat houses and roast beef of long ago.' Mayhew went on to note that the remaining Spitalfields weavers seemed resigned to their reduced circ.u.mstances and no longer had the energy to do anything about it: 'In all there was the same want of hope the same doggedness and half-indifference as to their fate.'

Spitalfields was not the only area of the metropolis that was experiencing poverty on an unprecedented scale. Across the river, the ancient area of Bermondsey was experiencing similar problems, as this heartbreaking excerpt from a coroner's report on the death of a poverty-stricken young woman shows: 'she lay dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over her almost naked body, there being no sheet or coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the doctor could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed. He then found it starved and scarred from rat bites.'

Similar accounts of abject poverty began appearing regularly in the London press. Under particular scrutiny once again were the already notorious common lodging houses which, according to the journalists who visited them, had plumbed even greater depths. The scathing press reports, combined with the report from the Royal Commission forced Parliament to address the common lodging house problem and an act was pa.s.sed in 1851 in a bid to improve the situation.

In their wisdom, the politicians responsible for drawing up the act came to the conclusion that the common lodging houses caused problems not because of the wanton lack of facilities and the type of person that frequented them, but because they lacked supervision and clear rules and regulations. The new act stipulated that every common lodging house should have clear signage outside stating what the building was used for. Inside, every sleeping room should be measured. From these measurements, the number of beds allowed in each room would be calculated and a placard hung on the wall stating the allocation. Beds were to have fresh linen once a week and all windows were to be thrown open at 10am each day for ventilation purposes. All lodgers had to leave the lodging house at 10am and would not be allowed back in until late afternoon. These regulations were to be enforced by the local police.

While the regulations imposed by the Common Lodging Houses Act were well meaning, they were at best badly thought out and at worst laughable. Measuring the rooms to allocate beds was all very well and good if only one person was going to sleep in each bed. However, it had been a long-standing practice for people to share beds in order to save money, thus doubling or even tripling the room capacity on particularly cold nights. The fact that each room had a sign stating the number of beds allowed was of virtually no use because few inmates could read and those that could were not about to report their only source of shelter to the authorities. Fresh bed linen once a week would have been a good idea if the act had also made the laundries obliged to take it in. In reality, few self-respecting laundries would touch lodging-house bed linen as it was often riddled with vermin, which infected the whole laundry.

In winter, the throwing open of all windows during the day made the unheated rooms bitterly cold. The fact that lodgers were thrown out on the street at 10 in the morning may have made for a quiet day for the lodging house management, but was cruel to the lodgers, many of whom were sick and malnourished. They had to take all their belongings and walk the streets for up to six hours in search of money for their bed for the next night. In the case of Spitalfields, the police knew only too well what type of characters inhabited the lodging houses and officers were unwilling to walk into the 'lion's den' for fear of being attacked. Consequently, few lodging houses were inspected regularly.

The Common Lodging Houses Act of 1851 had many failings, but probably its biggest fault was that it did not provide any regulation on the way the proprietors made their money. Consequently, prices for a bed were self-regulating. Anybody could go into business running common lodging houses, so long as they had a suitable property at their disposal. In Spitalfields, the downward slide of the local economy meant that by the mid-19th century, property prices were at an all-time low as no self-respecting house-hunter would even consider living there. The elegant master weavers' homes that had been so lovingly designed and furnished in the 1700s were now suffering from severe neglect. Roofs leaked, plaster fell off the walls, the kitchen ranges were clogged with grease and floorboards began to fall away. In 1857, The Builder magazine reported on the collapse of a house in Dorset Street, which resulted in the death of a child and warned that virtually every house in the street was in a similarly dangerous state of decay.

Consequently, these houses (which had once only been within the reach of the reasonably wealthy) could now be picked up for next to nothing. The combination of inexpensive property and a huge demand for cheap housing made Spitalfields one of the key areas for men and women keen to make their living from the misfortune of the poor. Most of the new landlords were previously itinerant entrepreneurs who acquired their property with money won by gambling on the horses or, as Henry Mayhew described, 'by direct robbery.' Furnis.h.i.+ngs were often obtained from hospitals or houses in which contagious disease had been rife. The furniture from this type of place was cheap as no one else wanted to risk buying it for fear of infection. Aspiring property magnates with little or no collateral soon hit on the idea of selling shares of their business in order to raise the start-up capital. Advertis.e.m.e.nts appeared in the newspapers offering a 4% return to investors in common lodging houses. Once a project had a sufficient number of investors, the property was converted and quickly let out. Most of the investors in this type of scheme lived far away and had little or no idea of how their 'customers' were being treated. If they had, it is doubtful they would have slept easily, as this description by Henry Mayhew clearly ill.u.s.trates: 'Padding-kens (common lodging houses) in the country are certainly preferable abodes to those in St Giles, Westminster or Whitechapel; but in the country as in the town, their condition is extremely filthy and disgusting; many of them are scarcely ever washed, and to sweeping, once a week is miraculous. In most cases they swarm with vermin. Except where their position is very airy, the ventilation is very imperfect, and frequent sickness the necessary result. It is a matter of surprise that the n.o.bility, clergy and gentry of the realm should permit the existence of such horrid dwellings.' Mayhew then goes on to describe the lodging houses in glorious detail: 'One of the dens of infamy may be taken as a specimen of the whole cla.s.s. They generally have a s.p.a.cious, though often ill-ventilated kitchen, the dirty dilapidated walls of which are hung with prints while a shelf or two are generally, though barely, furnished with crockery and kitchen utensils. In some places, knives and forks are not provided, unless a penny is left with the deputy or manager till they are returned. Average numbers of nightly lodgers is say 70 in winter, reducing to 40 in summer, when many visit the provinces... The general charge to sleep together is 3d per night or 4d for a single bed. There are family rooms that can be hired and crammed with children sleeping on the floor...

'The amiable and deservedly popular minister of a district church, built among the lodging houses, has stated that he has found 29 human beings in one apartment and that having with difficulty knelt down between two beds to pray with a dying woman, his legs became so jammed that he could hardly get up again. Some of the lodging houses are of the worst cla.s.s of low brothels, and some may even be described as brothels for children... At some of the busiest periods, numbers sleep on the kitchen floor... a penny is saved to the lodger by this means. More than 200 have been accommodated in this way in a large house.'

The Spitalfields common lodging houses catered for three major types of customer: those too ill or old to work, those too lazy to work and the common criminal. Consequently, the day-to-day running of them was not a job for the faint-hearted. Generally, lodging house proprietors employed a 'deputy' whose job it was to make sure that all inmates had paid for their beds and a 'night watchman', who acted as a bouncer, keeping unwanted individuals away. Both the deputy and the night watchman had to possess the ability to throw out anyone who could not pay for their bed, regardless of their situation. As this often meant ejecting pregnant women and sick, elderly persons, knowing full well that they would have to sleep rough, it can be a.s.sumed that lodging house employees did not possess much of a conscience.

The lodging house proprietors possessed even less concern for their fellow man. In addition to allowing desperate people to sleep in disgusting conditions, they made more money from their pathetic customers by seizing the local monopoly on essentials such as bread, soap and candles, which they sold on to lodgers at hugely inflated prices. Detective Sergeant Leeson, who patrolled the Spitalfields area in the late-19th century, wrote of the common lodging houses, 'the landlords of these places...are to my mind, greater criminals than the unfortunate wretches who have to live in them.'

In addition to the wretched lodging houses, Dorset Street and much of Spitalfields became overrun with mean tenements that were let out on a weekly basis. These tenements were usually let out by the room, which came spa.r.s.ely furnished with ancient and often dilapidated furniture. Thomas Archer wrote about such tenements in his report on 'The Terrible Sights of London', saying, '...each ruined room is occupied by a whole family, or even two or three families, houses which are never brought under the few and not very effective restrictions of the law, and where, from garret to bas.e.m.e.nt, men, women and children swarm and stifle in the foul and reeking air. It is here that poverty meets crime, and weds it.'

These tenements were particularly popular with prost.i.tutes as they provided the privacy required to service a client that was denied them in the huge dormitories of the common lodging houses. Landlords welcomed the prost.i.tutes because they could charge higher rent to allow for the risk of them being found to be living off immoral earnings. As the number of prost.i.tutes operating in Spitalfields dramatically increased in the second half of the 19th century, the landlords of the tenements realised that additional money could be made out of becoming more organised in the way they controlled their tenants.

Part Two.

THE VICES OF DORSET STREET.

Chapter 12.

The Birth of Organised Crime in Spitalfields.

The term 'organised crime' inevitably conjures up images of suit-wearing cigar-chewing, gun-toting gangsters such as Al Capone. However, this type of highly efficient, sophisticated gang leader didn't emerge until the 20th century. The organised crime that evolved in Spitalfields (and many other parts of London) in the 1870s was on a much more primitive level. Far from being criminal geniuses, the leaders of the Spitalfields underworld were simply men who wanted to make money, but did not possess the education or background to go about it in a strictly legal manner.

By the 1870s, Spitalfields landlords were becoming highly organised in the way they made their money. Common lodging houses represented the legitimate, if morally dubious, side of their business, as did the chandlers' shops (which sold household essentials such as candles, soap and oil) and general stores that proliferated in the area. However, the occupations and tastes of their lodgers created a huge demand for three services that were on the wrong side of the law: prost.i.tution, the fencing of stolen goods and illegal gambling.

A typical tenant of a common lodging house in Dorset Street and the surrounding roads was male and aged between 20 and 40. By day he would find casual work at one of the markets, on a building site or down at the docks. All these places of work provided a copious, never-ending supply of commodities well worth pilfering. Disposal of stolen goods was easy and quick; the chandlers' shops and general stores were more than happy to purchase foodstuffs and household essentials, which were then sold on at the usual, highly inflated prices. The lodging house proprietors were also not averse to fencing, as the journalist Henry Mayhew discovered while investigating London's poor: 'In some of these lodging houses, the proprietor(s)... are ”fences”, or receivers of stolen goods in a small way. Their ”fencing”... does not extend to any plate, or jewellery, or articles of value, but is chiefly confined to provisions, and most of all to those which are of ready sale to the lodgers. Of very ready sale are ”fish got from the gate” (stolen from Billingsgate); ”sawney” (thieved bacon), and ”flesh found in Leadenhall” (butchers' meat stolen from Leadenhall market).' If a more ambitious robbery was planned, the local shopkeepers' in-depth knowledge of the population usually meant that a buyer could be found for virtually anything within hours.

By night, lodging house residents, being young, free and mostly single, sought the company of women. Recognising a gap in the market, the canny landlords installed prost.i.tutes in their properties thus creating a new, highly lucrative revenue stream for themselves. Although the lodging houses were supposed to be patrolled by the police, this rarely happened, allowing brothels and prost.i.tution rings to be run without impediment. In October 1888, the East London Observer complained of the common lodging houses that 'No surveillance is exercised, and a woman is at perfect liberty to bring any companion she likes to share her accommodation.' The newspaper then went on to blame the prost.i.tutes for the proliferation of criminals in the lodging houses, which was unjust: 'If loose women be prevented from frequenting common lodging houses, their companions the thieves, burglars and murderers of London would speedily give up resorting to them.' As the lodging houses provided the 'thieves and burglars' with 'no questions asked' accommodation at an affordable price, it is unlikely they would have deserted them due to the lack of prost.i.tutes.